Symthic Forum was shut down on January 11th, 2019. You're viewing an archive of this page from 2019-01-08 at 22:44. Thank you all for your support! Please get in touch via the Curse help desk if you need any support using this archive.

Some quotes:
"There will not be an option to spawn into multiplayer games without being in a squad."

"When youÂre mortally wounded, the camera will zoom in on the soldier or vehicle that killed you. From there, youÂll go back to your own soldier see their hands on the ground covered in blood. They will also begin to cry out for a medic. YouÂll be able to look around in 360 degrees to get a better idea of your surroundings. From there, you have the option to allow yourself to bleed out, automatically restarting the spawn timer, or linger in place and wait for medical attention."

"Once a squad is completely wiped out, they will have to work very hard to regain the ground that theyÂve lost. Expect dramatic swings in the position of the front line over time."

"Every player will spawn into the game with a toolkit, and by spending resources players will be able to build sandbag walls, board up windows, add camouflage netting and even gun emplacements."

"In Battlefield 5, unlocks that impact gameplay Â including subclasses called Archetypes, perks, weapons and vehicles Â must be earned through play. DICE has vowed that they will not be available for purchase."

Assuming they add animations for entering AND leaving vehicles, during which players are vulnerable, so far it looks like Battlefield V is going to deliver some of the features I've been asking for since the early days of BF3:

No 3D spotting - This dumbs down the game and turns it into a game about shooting marks on the screen rather than actual enemy players.

No enemies visible on the mini-map - This dumbs down the game and turns it into "chase the dot on the map" rather than requiring the player to be aware of their surroundings.

Every player can revive - I've long felt that this was needed to help make squads more cohesive, encourage team-play and not force a meta where the medic stays back and plays conservatively in order to keep your squad alive. In BVFV it appears there are still advantages to utilizing a medic as your primary reviver, but it's not longer a requirement.

Revives take time and add an element of risk - The instant revives and ridiculous revive distance of the past few games have always felt game-breaking to me. They were mind-numbingly easy to perform with very little risk and massive reward. I'm super glad this is changing.

Full animations for entering and exiting vehicles - This may seem like a small thing but adding full animations for entering and leaving vehicles prevents the cheesing/abusing of vehicles as "instant get-out-of-jail-free cards" by instantly hopping into vehicles (teleporting, essentially) to escape incoming fire.

Most of these changes look really good. I am concerned though that staged health regen will only serve to destroy being alone as a strategy. This could lead into a lovely "crawling milsim" as Ravic put it. I could be wrong here, but the purpose of Ammo 2.0 (which appears to be in this game) was not to devalue being alone and make you completely non-viable in combat but to keep you going, just less efficiently. The health system seems to be a polar opposite of that, making it impossible to engage at all once you hit a certain amount of health. Will this be the new "give me ammo" spam in chat? Someone asking for meds all game long?
Of course, this could also mean the "skill cannon" weapon class will become more attractive to higher level players, as winning singular gunfights will end up being far more important (as opposed to now, where trading effective TTK in favor of being able to keep shooting is generally preferred regardless of skill level).

Other than that, these changes seem super interesting, the asymmetrical vehicle balance could create another "little bird main" issue though, hope they thread carefully with this one.

In a game with photorealism as a focus, the lack of 3D spotting will simply serve to make the game harder to play for people with visual disabilities such as myself. I can't play BF1 very well because reds, greens, browns, blacks, greys, blues all look the same color. In R6S, I am constantly getting wrecked by people that look the exact same color as their background and this is on top of how these players already minimize their exposure as much as possible. And as my eyesight continues to deteriorate, this will only become more problematic. Having good eyesight isn't a skill and the lack of 3D spotting isn't going to do anything but functionally turn the game into a vision exam.

They'll also have to come up with a new teamplay element for the Scout since its whole theme is around communicating enemy locations and 3D spotting could help players acquire those targets. This is a loss of teamwork opportunity just because the community cannot accept that shooting at icons vs shooting at avatars is not that big of a deal.

In a game with photorealism as a focus, the lack of 3D spotting will simply serve to make the game harder to play for people with visual disabilities such as myself. I can't play BF1 very well because reds, greens, browns, blacks, greys, blues all look the same color. In R6S, I am constantly getting wrecked by people that look the exact same color as their background and this is on top of how these players already minimize their exposure as much as possible. And as my eyesight continues to deteriorate, this will only become more problematic. Having good eyesight isn't a skill and the lack of 3D spotting isn't going to do anything but functionally turn the game into a vision exam.

They'll also have to come up with a new teamplay element for the Scout since its whole theme is around communicating enemy locations and 3D spotting could help players acquire those targets. This is a loss of teamwork opportunity just because the community cannot accept that shooting at icons vs shooting at avatars is not that big of a deal.

I can't speak to disabilities and while I always think we should be accommodating where able, something like that ultimately isn't something that can come before game/design direction.

Breaking down having to actually see your opponents in a shooter to being "a vision test" is absurd simplification to the point that you can just devalue literally anything that way. Aiming is a "hand movement test". Shooting is a "clicking test". And so on. But the reason it's an absurd complaint is because those things are exactly the whole idea.

Yes, you're expected to actually be able to see enemy players in a combat video game. Such a thing should at no point ever be up for debate.

DICE has been very clear about BFV's emphasis on physicality and world interaction. Players should be playing the world, not the HUD. Your finger should be on the trigger, not the spot button. All of that is straight from the lead designer and I agree entirely, it's BF finally going back to its roots.

Assuming they add animations for entering AND leaving vehicles, during which players are vulnerable, so far it looks like Battlefield V is going to deliver some of the features I've been asking for since the early days of BF3:

No 3D spotting - This dumbs down the game and turns it into a game about shooting marks on the screen rather than actual enemy players.

No enemies visible on the mini-map - This dumbs down the game and turns it into "chase the dot on the map" rather than requiring the player to be aware of their surroundings.

Every player can revive - I've long felt that this was needed to help make squads more cohesive, encourage team-play and not force a meta where the medic stays back and plays conservatively in order to keep your squad alive. In BVFV it appears there are still advantages to utilizing a medic as your primary reviver, but it's not longer a requirement.

Revives take time and add an element of risk - The instant revives and ridiculous revive distance of the past few games have always felt game-breaking to me. They were mind-numbingly easy to perform with very little risk and massive reward. I'm super glad this is changing.

Full animations for entering and exiting vehicles - This may seem like a small thing but adding full animations for entering and leaving vehicles prevents the cheesing/abusing of vehicles as "instant get-out-of-jail-free cards" by instantly hopping into vehicles (teleporting, essentially) to escape incoming fire.

While the argument itself is valid, I totally disagree with your opinion on 3D and minimap spotting. I think this is a must have feature in a game of brown/grey people fighting in a brown/grey environment with brown/grey ironsights. I have seen it in BF1 way too often where soldiers just blend in with their background AND the optics of the weapon. It is also an essential teamplay element since you do not only spot for yourself, but for the team.
DICE mentioned a more "tactical" approach to gunplay, but that argument is just laughable. What exactly is tactical about a game of 63 players on a wide open map, where nobody can or will communicate with others, when you can not see shit on your minimap and plan your movements accordingly? If they want to remove the mindless spawn-die circle of life, then maybe give us the tools to do so? The people who always died after spawning where the ones not playing with the minimap anyway.

Take an example from BF4. Caspian Border traversing from C to D. The shortest way is straight through the river and then up. Or you take the long routes around and come up from behind or the sides. That is map knowledge. Experience tells you that enemies will spawn in closer to the Checkpoint area, so be advised when you go the long route. 2D spotting from you and your team (or the enemy) will give you an immediate hint about the most beneficial way to get up. 3D spotting will help you and your team see your target. And it is counterable, you can use a suppressor on your gun and the perk to be harder to spot and for a shorter period of time. That is some tactical shit.

Now tell that to one of the 64 poor BF1 bastards traversing a brown wasteland with no cover and possible enemies in every crater, while their squadmates 75m away is desperately trying to mark the enemy for him, because 3D spotting only works half the time in a limited angle because saying "There is a guy in the brown puddle ahead of you, no not that one, to the left next to the big puddle by the slightly less brown mud." is not a very precise option. You would have to type that in chat as well, or use the awful voicechat, but maybe both are turned off.

If you want a game to be tactical, say on a CS:GO or R6 level, maybe it will dawn on someone that the maps and playercounts might be about 10 times too big and that the communication tools are not used at all, so you need something to accomodate for that?

Aiming is a dexterity test. The more twitch aim is emphasized, the more the game heads into dexterity test territory.

These tests are bad because physical health barriers are being put into place that preclude skills like map knowledge and reading the enemy.

While I do not mind some aspect of comparing your mechanical abilities like through aiming, there is simply no way you can improve your eyesight. It's not something you can train like your hand-eye coordination or your foresight.

@VincentNZ

has the right idea too. To be "tactical" and "strategic" the player has to have information to make a decision. Depriving information reduces this into blind guessing. And he is also right that the people who die are the ones with poor situational awareness in the first place. Removing spot icons won't affect them in the slightest. The people who are affected are the ones that did pay attention except now people like me will look no different from someone who is truly unaware. It's not that I don't pay attention; I just lack the eye health needed to differentiate a reddish-brown blob of pixels from another reddish-brown blob of pixels.

To me this is no different than giving people permanent invisibility (because for my eyesight it effectively is) and asking me to have a fair fight. The only way I'll be able to compensate is by learning common spots that players hang out in and firing a shot to see if a hitmarker appears which is far from ideal.

If they wanted to reduce the power of spotting, then they should introduce counterplay mechanics like MGO3 did. Then DICE will have added a layer of gameplay depth called information warfare instead of removing a layer. So far BFV is shaping up to be a game that raises the barrier to entry across the board.

Yep, this is really true. My eysight is alright, at least I never felt I had an issue with seeing stuff in-game, but with the rich colour range of dirt, I find it a bit rough to tell the player to look for "grass bent through player movement". I mean everybody has likely watched a documentary and saw a damn yellow and black striped tiger stalk his prey through grass, and even that one is tough to see. Maybe pink backpacks will help thanks to customization, but at the range of 100m everything will look grey.

And again, if I look at a game like CS or R6, I can be tactical without 3d spotting, but I still have a highly accurate map, the exact number of enemies left and a map so small that when my teammate says "Behind box 3" I know exactly where that fellow is. Whereas in BF on any map, I have 31 enemies, a thousand hiding spots and with maps like in BF1 as many ways to enter or exit an area.

Sound and other visual factors do not help a whole lot here either. I mean with grenades exploding every second, the casual drive-by of a Churchill, or the odd V1 rocket causing a slight dent into the map from time to time, pin-pointing the exact position is more than a challenge. It is also based on your own setup. I would still say most people play with standard non-surround boxes, and with the standard FOV on a screen of 24'' maximum. That is not exactly helping. Or remember the BF1 release where enemy tank shots would just not be heard at all and would not mark them on the minimap, or the ghost sounds that came from 50m ahead of you. Or look at all the poor souls in Arma and PUBG crawling through the high grass and wheat fields, thinking that they are invisible when in fact it just will not render, or I might turn that stuff off in the options menu.
A minimap however with information input that is player dependant, well that works all the time and more with teamplay.

While I empathize with people with poor vision (mine isn't that great either), but I feel like that's a problem with the game's color palette more than anything else. Ghost Recon: Wildlands also has realistic graphics and a greyish-brown color palette, but they manage to make vision perfectly manageable, even without all the 3D spotting mechanics. Of course GRW isn't as fast-paced as Battlefield so that may have an impact, but only time will tell.

I'm fairly confident DICE isn't dumb enough to create a game where vision is a chore to the point that it actually turns people away.